Finding joy by the grocery store butter
Living Happy
Random Person at Store (standing in front of the freezer that holds all the butter and fake butter products): I am buying butter.
Me: That’s great.
Random Person at Store: Butter is better for you than canola oil or margarine.
Me (wondering about my choice of light butter and also wondering about what to say): Oh.
This is not a brilliant conversational choice, but I was super sad at the moment worrying about someone I love having a cancer appointment.
Random Person at Store: You look a little dehydrated, dear.
Me (again with the brilliance): Oh.
Random Person at Store (walking off towards bread): Drink more water!
I did drink more water, but the point here is that this weird conversation brought me so much joy. It’s also made me think a bit about Barbara Frederickson, Ph.D. "broaden-and-build theory" about joy.
There’s this great synopsis of it on a Psychology Today post by Hilary Jacobs Hendel. She writes that the theory says,
“The capacity to experience joy is ever-present. Your joy might be deeply buried to protect you from being disappointed or wounded, but it is still there.
“Joy has a special ability to broaden our mind's perspective, as opposed to constricting it, which happens during the negative emotional states of anxiety and depression. In other words, joy may have an exponentially positive effect on one's future thoughts and behaviors.
“Joy makes us want to play, expand our curiosity, and connect with others.
“Joy lessens the time spent in negative mood states and helps us physiologically recover from negative states more rapidly.
“Through deeply felt experiences of joy, people increase their creativity, knowledge, and resilience.
“The bottom line: Joy increases our health and social capacity.”
I’ve been thinking a bit about why this random stranger at the grocery store made me so happy, and I think it’s because of a couple things. They noticed that I looked dehydrated which made me feel like someone cared. Having a stranger care about you is really about being seen and about community. And because in that exact moment my joy wasn’t buried, cocooned away because I was afraid of being disappointed, it bubbled right out.
Could I have been potentially devastated that I apparently walk around looking dehydrated? Maybe. Could I have been angry that someone was taking a long time at the butter section and was maybe judgmental about my own choice in saturated fats? Maybe.
But I made the choice not to be. And, believe you me, I am not saint who always makes the right choices. Totally not. But when I lean into the choice for joy, it does all those things Frederickson talks about: it makes me bigger and better and kinder. It makes me feel connected to observant strangers and the whole huge and exceptional world around me.
Henri Nouwen once wrote, "Joy does not simply happen to us. We have to choose joy and keep choosing it every day.”
That isn’t always easy, right? Those connections that joy creates really matter. That feeling of joy and gratitude for even the smallest of interactions matters because there are so many people turning toward negativity, toward hate, toward judgements.
"Joy is the simplest form of gratitude," Karl Barth said and that’s really a beautiful sentence.
Joy is the simplest form of gratitude.
I was grateful that the grocery store person talked to me, noticed me, noticed my dehydrated state and cared enough to be a surrogate parent in that moment to tell me to have some water. I was grateful to be alive, walking, and having enough money to buy butter. I was grateful that there was a grocery store to buy it in, honestly.
There are so many things we take for granted every day. Simple things. Huge things. Even boring things. How cool is it that we get to take them for granted though? How cool is it that even when we’re sad we have moments to be grateful for, moments where we can embrace joy and each other?